Version 3.3 dropped user controls from BlogEngine and new widgets use Razor views instead. To start developing new widget, open source code in Visual Studio, navigate to BlogEngine.NET/Custom/Widgets in the solution explorer and add "Example" folder. If you run application and go to admin/custom/widgets, you'll see "Example" widget added to available widgets. You can even drag it to widget zone and save changes. More...

Not been a Facebook junkie, I ran into this post in Portuguese (thanks Bing translator) and found that people apparently like to add pages to Facebook and share them with friends. Not my cup of tea but hey, we should celebrate our differences, right? So I checked out that widget and ended up improving it a little bit. More...

Few people mentioned that my FlickrBar widget for BlogEngine.Net got out of sync with Widgets framework after framework got interface change. I have updated widget to work with latest releases including 1.6.0 and 1.6.1, you can download it using link below. Instruction on how to use are dead simple: move files in the corresponding location and widget will pop up as an option in the zone dropdown. Go to “edit” and enter what kind of photos you want streamed down to your blog, set number of photos to display, may be change CSS (for example, use “padding:2px” to get gaps between pictures). You can see end result on the right side bar in my blog.

Feedjit is a service that provides live traffic feed for your site. It is easy to set up – you copy chunk of HTML and insert it into your blog’s markup. That is, if you know HTML and used to editing files in your blog, which shouldn’t be a requirement for average blogger. This is why popular blog providers supply Feedjit widgets – so that blogger does not have to edit files by hand and FTP them to the host. In this little exercise we create such a widget for BlogEngine. More...

When working with Widgets framework in upcoming BlogEngine 1.4, you have three choices for saving widget settings to data store: StringDictionary, XmlDocument and CustomObject. StringDictionary is really a simple one and will fit your needs in a lot (if not most) cases. XmlDocument provides more flexible data storage excellent for complex hierarchical data structures, but it might be a daunting task to handle. You might look at LinkList that comes with standard install on example of using XmlDocument. Custom object provides you with familiar way of working with complex data, but it has it's own gotchas. I'll try to address some of them here. More...